Darkest Double
by K Hanna Korossy
Summary: Out with the Old tag story: A case brings home to Dean just how much his brother is struggling.


**Darkest Double**  
K Hanna Korossy

"I don't like this." Yeah, Dean thought unhappily, that didn't sound whiny at all.

Then again, Sam wasn't nearly as exasperated as he normally would've been. "Dude, I'll be fine."

"Right. Like the other day when you fell asleep at the wheel and almost crashed into that semi."

Sam's cheeks flushed. It was the only color in his face. "I'm not gonna drive this time, all right?"

Dean hesitated. Fighting a familiar inner battle: what Sam wanted versus what Dean knew was best for him.

The fact was, Sam was very far from all right. His eyes kept darting to empty spaces or flinching from things that weren't there. By his own admission, the hallucinations were nearly constant now, including whenever he tried to sleep. He was living on coffee and willpower, his eyes sunken enough to draw stares and his hands twitchy. Dean kept hoping Sam would get a handle on it, that Dean could tether him to reality long enough for it to take, but so far they were only slowing the decline, not stopping it. And having Sam go off to talk to a widow on his own, no matter how tame an assignment, left Dean himself twitchy.

"Dean—"

"Fine, okay? You talk to her, I go talk to the Markows, and then I'll pick you up. You don't go anywhere else, okay?"

The little brother he knew would've been annoyed and rebellious at such strictures. It disturbed Dean to no end that Sam just meekly nodded and climbed out of the car.

As Dean peeled away from the curb, he tried not to be terrified that he'd lost that little brother for good.

00000

The case was lame, as far as things to worry about when Leviathan threatened to eat the world and Sam's brain was turning into pudding. It was what they did, however, even when Dean's final year had been counting down, or Sam had struggled with supernatural powers, or Lucifer had been on the loose. Life went on until it didn't, and so they were in Durango looking into dead people sightings around town. Sam was thinking ghouls. Dean was hoping it was the Big Mouths, because he was just itching to dunk one into a vat of Borax and pretend it was Dick Roman.

Sam was looking more and more right, however.

The Markow twins, middle-aged sisters who, creepily, still dressed alike and wore their hair the same and finished each other's sentences, couldn't explain seeing their dead parents again. Their mom— _It was definitely Mama, wasn't it, Dee? Oh, absolutely, Sue—_ had even acted like it was totally normal to turn up on her daughters' doorstep...two months after her death. She and her not-husband had tried to invite themselves in, at which point the sisters had locked the door, called the police, and freaked out. They hadn't seen their "parents" since.

They hadn't sensed anything strange about the pair. No, no weird smells or mannerisms or eyes. _Why do you ask, detective?_ The EMF detector stayed silent, but it wouldn't have reacted to ghouls. In all, the interview was a bust, except for the fact that Dean could finally go pick up his brother now. He only ran one red light on the way.

Sam was waiting at the curb, putting his phone away when he caught sight of Dean. He slid into the car with a curt, "Well, that was pointless," and settled into the seat with a sigh.

Dean eyed him. He didn't look worse than he had before, and besides one hand rubbing the car seat, he seemed to be keeping it together okay. Dean's unease backed off at having Sam where he could see him again. "Let me guess: nothing suspicious besides her dearly departed husband being back like nothing happened."

"No," Sam huffed, "she says she never said she saw Mac—her husband. She was 'confused.'" He swatted at the back of his head with a frown, casting a glare into the back seat before turning away.

Dean, like he did so often these days, pretended not to notice. "Confused. Right. Because people are always going, 'hey, what's Dad doing there, he died last year? No, wait, that's just the guy from down the street. My bad.'" He frowned over at Sam, who was now rubbing his thumb into his palm...but the good palm, not the bad one. "Sam? Hey, you need a reality check?"

"What? No." Sam shook his hands loose, placed them in his lap. "I don't know. Ghouls are...ghouls are weird, right? I mean, eating dead people—who does that?"

"Uh...ghouls," Dean said slowly, frowning as he kept glancing over at Sam. "And that doesn't explain why Mrs. Karns said she saw her husband before but takes it back now."

"Right, right." Sam fidgeted in his seat. "Maybe it's just restless spirits." He was back to rubbing the vinyl, with both hands.

"No EMF," Dean said distractedly, watching those hands. "And anyway, three restless spirits in the news at the same place, the same time?

"Okay, uh. So it's ghouls and Mrs...uh..." Sam squeezed his eyes shut. "It's, uh...it's really loud."

"More _Stairway to Heaven_?" Dean asked sympathetically. Since Sam had revealed the other day that Lucifer had played it for him fifty times in a row, Dean had kept the radio off. The last thing he wanted was to add to the crazy.

"No, it's..." Sam seemed to lose his train of thought. Probably not hard to do when you had reality and Hell competing for your attention. "So the ghouls...did the Markows give you anything?"

"Dead Mom and Dad show up at the door, want to stay for tea or something, girls slam the door shut, don't see them again. And besides Dead Couple Walking, the sisters didn't see or hear or smell anything weird."

"Great. That's great. That's..." Sam jolted in his seat. "Why is that—No!" He started pulling at his jacket. "Get it off! Get it off me!"

Stomach knotting, Dean pulled to the side of the road and immediately swiveled to grab Sam's flailing hands. This was the worst he'd ever seen it. "Hey. Sam. Listen to me. It's not there, okay? It's not. Look at me, just...ignore whatever crap you're seeing and focus on me."

"It's not," Sam was chanting under his breath. "It's not, it's not, it's—he's crazy, he's not...I can't...this isn't real, it's not—ghouls are-are—I can't!"

Whoa. Confusion and panic were one thing, but this was veering a little close to psychotic break. And while Dean's research showed that was something they could look forward to down the road, it shouldn't be yet. Please, God, not yet. "Sam, hey, shh, shh, take it easy." He risked letting go of one of Sam's hands to grab his chin. "Just keep your eyes on me. Look at me, kid." This was happening too freaking fast...

Sam's eyes were darting all over the place, however. "There isn't, there isn't, I can't, it's not— Please! He's crazy, I can't..."

He. Sam kept saying 'he,' and Dean didn't think he meant Lucifer. His grip went slack. Since when did reality slipping mean talking about yourself in third person? Unless... He let go of Sam completely and dipped into his jacket for his phone. A couple of seconds and he had the camera trained on Sam.

Or not Sam, considering his eyes flared silver on the screen.

"Son of a bitch," Dean growled. He reached under his seat and pulled out the silver blade he had stashed there. The shifter didn't even try to stop him when Dean jammed the blade against its throat. "Where's Sam?"

The hazel eyes rolled. "He's crazy, he's...I knew it wasn't real, he wasn't...but it's Hell?"

The thing that looked too much like Sam was actually frothing a little at the mouth, spittle dotting Dean's hand as he held the knife. The whites of its eyes were showing, and it kept bobbing, hard enough to tear its skin on the silver blade. It didn't even seem to notice.

Suddenly, the figure spasmed. "Get it off. GET IT OFF!" And then it was going nuts, slapping at its arms, its coat, like it was on fire. "It's—STOP IT!" It was tearing at its skin, trying to shift in front of Dean, or maybe just mindless in its panic. "Stop, I can't do it! It's—"

"Hey—"

And before Dean could say more than that, the thing gave a chilling scream...and slammed its body forward against Dean's knife.

Blood pumped over his hand, warm and red as if it were human. Even as Dean jerked away, horrified, the thing that looked like Sam convulsed against the opposite door, bleeding and flopping and oozing. It tore at the skin on its face with shredded hands, tearing itself apart even as it succumbed. The panic slowly leached from its eyes, replaced by a dull green-brown that still haunted Dean's dreams from when Sam had died in his arms at Cold Oak. And then it was over, the shifter dead in the front seat, a pile of loose limbs in red-soaked denim and flannel.

Dean shut his mouth. Dropped the knife out of his shaking hand into the wheel well. Shut his eyes, just for a moment, to the nightmare in the car with him. Then he pulled the car out into a vicious u-turn, back toward the Widow Karns' house. Somewhere along the way, he'd lost Sam and ended up with an imposter straight out of his nightmares. He was gonna get Sam back.

The smell of iron made him want to gag, even the taste of the blood creeping down his throat. He determinedly ignored the gory sight next to him, the way it gently swayed with each sharp turn he made. He focused on the road, on Sam waiting for him. Definitely not thinking about his brother's head being so screwed up that it drove a friggin' shapeshifter insane, that it would rather kill itself than live in Sam's world any longer. Yeah, not thinking any of that right now.

Except, idiotically, that they never should've split up.

00000

There was nothing at the Karns house: no sign of a struggle, no blood, no busted door. Nothing but Mrs. Karns tied up in a back bedroom.

"How long have you been here?" Dean barked as he sliced through the ropes.

"This morning...right after breakfast...but it was _Bill_ again!"

This morning: so he'd delivered Sam to the door of a freakin' trap. "It was an imposter," he said, cutting her feet loose and already turning away.

She was staring at his bloody clothes, her eyes glazed. "But...but..."

He slowed despite himself. "It wasn't Bill," he said gently, because false hope was worse than no hope.

Then he was out the door.

Problem was, he had no other place to look. Dean glanced this way and that on the front porch, chewing his lip, then toward the Honda he'd arrived in. The car had a dead Sam-looking thing in it, and with the shifter dead, he was fresh out of suspects. The only consolation was that shifters kept their prey alive so they could draw information from them, and Sam's double had clearly been a little _too_ tapped into Sam when it died.

But...the Markow twins had said _both_ their parents had shown up at the door. And shifters could mimic just about anyone, but even they couldn't replicate more than one person at a time. Jaw set, Dean headed toward the Honda.

Except, he couldn't. Not with that mop of brown hair just visible in the passenger window.

Cursing, he ignored the mess long enough to grab his Colt from the glove compartment and the shotgun he'd stashed in the trunk. Then he yanked the handkerchief out of his pocket. It took him less than thirty seconds to feed it down into the gas tank and light the end that stuck out. He was two houses away when the car went up in a fireball.

By the time the sirens approached, Dean was driving away in a borrowed SUV.

They'd left their arsenal of supplies in the motel room, nothing in the car besides the basics. He'd go back to the room and suit up, grab the rest of the case info, and start looking. Shifters liked their underground lairs; he just needed a starting point to find Sam.

He was so intent on his goal, he didn't notice the figure behind the motel room door until it jumped him.

Dean caught a glimpse of dark blond hair and one of his favorite shirts as it pounced. Himself? Weirdly appropriate. And his best chance to find out where Sam was. Dean flipped the shifter over his shoulder and lunged after it without mercy.

The shifter knew all his moves. Dean made a few up. No holding back; he didn't even care anymore. Not with Sam at stake.

He dodged a kick as expected, followed with a blow of his own, also expected. Flashed the knife at the last second, a total cheat, and aimed for the face, also not his usual. Good guys were always hampered in fights with evil because they had moral codes, weaknesses, lines they weren't willing to cross. Dean crossed them. Kick to the groin. Gouge of an eye. An ear cut off, gooey. A kicked-out knee, and then a final slice of hamstrings. Maybe the shifter could shift muscle back into repair, but for the moment, this one wasn't going anywhere.

Dean hovered over it like the angel of death, knife against its throat. Demanding, "Where's Sam?" Deja vu.

The thing with his face—if he'd stuck half his face into a propeller like the dude in Indiana Jones—glared at him.

Dean snorted. "Dude, you think that scares me? I practice that look in the mirror."

"You killed him."

He was pretty sure his voice didn't sound that gravelly, but whatever. "Your buddy? He killed himself, actually."

"My mate."

Dean's mouth twitched. "Oh yeah? Which one of you was the bitch in the relationship?"

The thing bucked once, uselessly as Dean pulled out the demon-killing knife—ineffective on shifters but still plenty effective as a knife—and tacked its arm to the carpet. "You wanna play pincushion? I can do that. Where's. Sam?"

"He's crazy. Lee knew it right away, but we thought we could handle it. Your brother killed Lee."

"I'm crying on the inside." He scraped the blade over the things's Adam's apple, watching dispassionately as the silver made its flesh blister. "One more time."

"The Leviathan have a bounty on you two, you know. We just wanted to draw you here, catch you. We never killed anybody."

That made him pause. That shapeshifter years ago in St. Louis, it had told Sam that its kind just wanted company, love. Apparently this one had found it in another of its species. Ironic, that it hadn't killed but had succumbed to a more human motive: greed. Dean huffed as he tugged his knife free, ignoring the thing's groan as he rested the blade on its thigh. "You took my brother for a freakin' bounty. Yeah, that's so much better." He started to dig the point in.

"Without Lee, my life is over anyway," the shifter said through clenched teeth. And then it reared up, arms coming up at Dean from both sides.

He reacted automatically. Even so, the pressure wouldn't have even been enough to kill, but like its mate, the shifter's goal was suicide. The knife impaled it in the chest, not quite above the heart, but near enough. It gasped a few times, gave Dean a bloody smile, and died.

Sickened, Dean fell back. His hand was shaking, wet with blood when he brought it up to his face to wipe at his mouth. He let it drop, wondering when this case had become a massacre instead of a hunt. He hadn't meant... He didn't even want... But there it was, the second corpse—carcass—of the day, and he was no closer to Sam.

Dazed, Dean staggered to his feet and the sink to wash off his hands.

He threw all their stuff into a nondescript hunchback from the other end of the lot and wiped down the SUV. With the trail of crime scenes he was leaving, they couldn't change cars enough. He paused by the shifter's body, drawn to do something, he wasn't sure what. Close its eyes at least, maybe: it seemed wrong to just leave it staring. Dean's hands hovered above its face.

He frowned and leaned closer. Was that...? He touched a finger to the sweat at its temple. Black dust. Coal?

There wasn't a mine in the vicinity, Dean knew that for sure. Some kind of processing plant? No, it wasn't the right area for that, either. He ran a hand through his hair, "Come on, Dean." Coal: diamonds, antique stoves, power plants...steam engines. An old rail yard? Hadn't they passed one on the way into town? Dean lunged for the map tucked into the top of Sam's duffel.

He left the motel room in flames, too. The SUV would connect the two sites, but the evidence would be inconclusive at best. Without clear causes and victims, let alone perpetrators, the police would eventually let it go.

He and Sam would be long gone by then, Dean hoped.

00000

Finding Sam was the easy part.

Not that the rail yard was small. It was a maze of rails and train cars, wheelhouses and sheds. Dean kicked himself as he rolled up that he hadn't checked for sewer or other tunnels under the area. But there were still plenty of places to hide, between all the buildings and the rail cars. Dean headed toward the section that was obviously the train graveyard, hollering for Sam as he went.

And, miraculously, a minute later Sam hollered back, his voice thin and muffled.

"Where are you? Keep talking!" Dean sped up his pace, peering into open cars as he went, hopping half up onto the edge of one for a better look.

 _"In here. Shed or something. Dean!"_

"I'm coming, Sammy. Keep talking." The shack over there, maybe?

 _"They're shapeshifters. Two."_ Sam sounded exhausted but not badly hurt. Dean analyzed his brother's voice even as he paused at a little booth on the way to the shack, just in case, but it was empty. _"Not ghouls. Got the drop on me."_

"Don't worry about it, they're toast." He reached the door to the shack, rolling his eyes when he found it padlocked. "Fire in the hole," he called, and shot the lock off with one shot.

Sam lay hog-tied in his skivvies inside, the rope tight enough against his neck that it left a red groove. Dean was amazed he'd been able to yell as much as he did.

"Hey," he said softly, already trading gun for knife as he crouched. He slid a hand over Sam's matted, coal-dusted hair, then sawed through the rope connecting his wrists and his neck, followed by the one from hand to ankles. "That's good, that's done. You okay?" He got to work freeing Sam's hands and feet.

Sam groaned as Dean helped untwist him, blood flowing to places that had to be totally numb. Dean did his best to massage them: hands and biceps and legs, even pulled Sam's boots off to make sure his ankles were okay and his feet weren't too swollen.

"Okay, better. Sam?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." It would've been more convincing if he hadn't been panting it into Dean's leg, but whatever. A Sam in denial was a Sam getting back to normal.

Or what stood for normal these days.

Dean unfolded the long limbs, reminded ridiculously of unfolding tent poles, and got Sam sitting, albeit slumped, against the wall of the shack. It was a warm day; he'd worried more about dehydration than hypothermia. But Sam was shivering in his undershirt and briefs, and Dean realized he was a little shocky.

"Easy, easy," he crooned as he pulled his flannel shirt off and manhandled Sam into it, grateful he'd changed out of the bloody over-shirt at a red light. Their voices had always helped anchor the other, even before Sam's mind had started bleeding Hell into reality. "We'll get you out of here in a minute, find you some water. You hurt anywhere? Did they knock you out?"

Sam's face was furrowed with confusion, but his hand rose vaguely toward his head.

Dean stopped him, tilted his head forward with one hand to study the goose egg. It wasn't bleeding, but it looked painful. He leaned Sam back and craned down to see his eyes.

"Sam. Hey. Look at me."

Sam blinked and slowly obeyed.

His pupils were equal and both reacted to the change in light. His eyes were bloodshot but not glassy, not dilated. Totally normal.

Except for the way they darted to spots over Dean's shoulder and head as he grimaced, exhausted and overwhelmed and despairing.

"Aw, Sam," Dean sighed, tipping his own forehead against his brother's. He couldn't help remember the insanity in the Sam-shifter's eyes, the way it's brain just collapsed under what Sam had been dealing with for months. _Months._ He swore softly, wishing he could call Bobby about this, or his Dad, or _anyone_.

"You killed them?" Sam mumbled.

"Yep. Hunt's over. Time for a break."

"'Think I'm already—"

"Don't." He wanted to say that Sam should've told him how bad it was, except he'd been trying to. Dean had just been in denial, pretending Sam could handle this, that they could keep going while they found a way to fix it. He pulled back, one hand flat against Sam's chest. "We're off-duty as of today, okay? No more cases until we figure out how to put your head back together."

"What if we—?"

"We will. I'm not accepting anything else."

Sam gave him a lopsided smile. He didn't look crazy, but he was so freakin' weary, it broke Dean a little. "I forgot, nobody says no to Dean Winchester." He was slurring his words.

"Damn straight." He slid an arm behind Sam. "C'mon, let's get out of here."

Sam was limping, rubbing at his wrists. "Dean Winchester is Kryptonite's weakness."

"Uh-huh." He was busy easing Sam out the shack's narrow door, then kicking debris out of the way with his foot.

"Ghosts s-sit around campfires telling Dean Winchester s-stories." Sam jerked, the by-now familiar reaction to some assault Dean couldn't see.

He held Sam tighter, trying hard to ground him. His big little brother was some pounds thinner than last Dean had checked. "Mmm."

"Superman wears...wears Dean Winchester pajamas."

Sam's rambling finally caught up to him, and Dean snorted. "Dude, you've been reading those Chuck Norris jokes again, haven't you."

Sam was shaking, and his hand darted up to catch Dean's arm and hold on. "Dude...are you really bloody, or is Lucifer just glad to see you?"

"That part's real. 'Shifters died messy."

"Oh." They were walking like a pair of old men. Sam was so getting a couple of sleeping pills crushed into his water. "Dean Winchest—"

"Sam," he said, his throat tight and heart full to bursting. "Shut up."

 **The End**


End file.
